Gray Anatomy

    When people think of the colors most closely associated with the city of Seattle, many attribute the frequent rainy days to the color gray. Especially popularized in various movies, Seattle is synonimous with the gray skies even if many other cities get more rain than Seattle. None the less, colors can have a great effect on the mental state and interpretation of a subject like Seattle. According to Dr. Vien Cheung at the University of Leeds: “presence of such colours in our environment influences our emotions and wellbeing” (Cheung). This means that the colors often appear in the common day to day life of someone living in Seattle could be affected by the frequency in which the gray color appears across the city and the sky. As a result, understanding what colors do tend to appear in the city gives a strong idea of what When looking at recording the colors found throughout Seattle, pictures were taken at two different areas and perspectives. One area was on the ground looking up a slight hill and the other was up on top of tall building, looking over the city-scape. Each of the pictures were taken over the span of a week, taking pictures at different times of day throughout the week. By looking at these two areas at various different times, a slightly more hollistic view of the colors in Seattle. These images were then also converted to find the top ten most prominent colors found in each of the images, all of which was put into the following stacked bar chart. Observing the results, much of the most prominent colors found in each image at the different times are a lot of grays, blacks, and blues. This shows that some of the common conceptions of Seattle are true about a lot of grays across the city, even if there is still a bit of diversity across the area within the bounds of “gray” color.